Ruby Encoding Cheat Sheet

When receiving a BINARY string from the network or file system, make sure to force_encode it to its correct encoding.

In general, the encoding information is provided in an out-of-band channel, such as the Content-Type header in HTTP

If you don't know the encoding, the String is BINARY forever and should not be concatenated with non-BINARY strings

When calling force_encoding on a BINARY String, immediately call encode! afterwards. This will transcode the String
to the default_internal encoding

When using a regular expression with /u, make sure that only Unicode Strings are possible

When using a regular expression with /n, make sure that only BINARY Strings are possible

If you get an incompatible encoding between BINARY (ASCII-8BIT) and another encoding, the correct debugging approach
is to identify where the BINARY String came from. Usually, this means that a library read in BINARY data from the
network and didn't give it an encoding.

In app code, never use force_encoding to convert BINARY data into a particular encoding. By the time you've reached
app code, you have lost the information about which encoding is being used. Instead, find where the String came into
Ruby, and fix it to set up the encoding based on the information it knows.

In library code, only use force_encoding to convert BINARY data into an encoding if you have information about
what encoding is being used. This means that you have a header in network protocols or a magic comment in templates
(like ERB) or source files.

Only include the magic comment in source files that actually contain characters from that encoding

To combine two Strings with known, but different encodings, use encode to transcode the Strings into the same
encoding, then combine them.

Yehuda, your concise notes and musings have been an inspiration to a few projects of mine. The biggest is TinyTDS which was the first backend connection mode for SQL Server that handled encodings correctly. Both it and the adapter will be released in the upcoming Rails Installer project. I'll be bookmarking this for reference anytime I have to think about encodings again. Keep it up and thanks again for sharing!

It might be worth a slight wording change to denote that force_encoding isn't actually "converting" anything, rather switching the encoding flag on the string. No bytes are actually modified and the String isn't even read at all with force_encoding.

Just to make it absolutely clear what it's doing vs encode and encode! at least?